How can we keep signal/noise high in the forum?

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How do we, as a community, help to not de-rail discussions like these, that should be mostly for developers with something meaningful to add to the conversation?

Maybe don’t post unless you have something to say about the proposed design, or the like?

I understand sometimes it is hard to not express our own opinion (heck, even I didn’t managed to shut up, this being my second post on this thread). Ocassionally one CAN provide some meaningful insight… but this thread shows it is not THAT common, or particularly ground-breaking. :smiley:

In short… can we let’s try and leave these threads free to the people actually doing the work?

Thanks to all in advance, and sorry for my part of the noise.

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Posting in an open forum invites everyone to participate in the discussion. The “people doing the work” (or anyone really) can opt not to respond to every post they think is misguided.
As long as - and this is important - it stays civil, doesn’t get too off-topic, or devolves into a circular discussion, there’s nothing wrong with that.

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I think what Oscar was askinr for is: when someone says something that doesn’t make sense, and there was already a reply pointing out the mistake, there doesn’t need to be 3 more replies from other people saything that there’s a mistake.

If the original poster insists on repeating their mistake.

Then we can move on, forget about the mistakes and bad ideas, and continue the discussion in a more constructive way.

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Sorry, then I may have misunderstood Oscar.

Well, yeah, no clear way how to handle that, other than ignore the post. But I see how that’s difficult and still doesn’t remove the noise if others keep engaging…
Maybe the forum needs an “ignore user x in thread y” function. Though you’ll still see people replying to user x…

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Would be cool if threads had “side notes” :smiley:… or heck… actual threaded and collapsible conversations (a la old.reddit.com, but then again… we can de-rail anything with just a bit of imagination :-D).

Thanks for the topic split, @humdinger, and thanks to @PulkoMandy for making sense of my sloppy writting.

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Meh this thread itself is noise. Nobody wants to be muted, I doubt BiPolar themselves would even like that if implemented. The reality is if they wanted no commentary at all, they would be having this discussion in Jira or the mailing list.

I like the open discussion we have now, and I think many people have adjusted to each other over time. As long as the discussions aren’t driving developers to do more development in private then its not a problem.

There is also the issue of its easy to miss things like Waddlesplash’s comment that he wanted to keep the thread condensed in the original comment etc… because when you click on a thread it usually takes you to the bottom. So there are some people in the thread that never read it.

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That’s unfortunately one of the many problems this forum software has, it doesn’t lead itself well to structured technical discussions but more “social” discussions. : (

(also stuff like treating everything as markdown, making it hard to paste code, bad handeling of quotes (or multi level quotes) etc.)

It’s all very “modern” “web 3.0” unfortunately

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I think the best way to achieve that is to make the topic as tightly focused as it can be and have a moderator either remove off-topic posts or split them out into a different thread.

At some point the thread should get locked if the discussion isn’t going anywhere for a long time. It’s not like the discussion can’t be continued at a later date in a new thread.

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I think it’s a bad idea and does not give people the greatest idea of a forum to lock peoples discussions. Especially when they aren’t your own topics. I see other forums do this, even tech forums, where someone will have a the same issue down the line to an old thread. If they bump an old thread then some moderator locks it and gives some lame excuse.

This would be like a pot of coffee on the hot-plate. Just because you aren’t drinking it or don’t want it, doesn’t mean you should dump it. There are plenty of people who want to drink it still, and they will take care of it when they’re done.

I think the best policy is to ignore threads you don’t care about. Don’t reply and let people who do want to continue the discussion continue the discussion. And yes, any truly off-topic discussions should be branched off into their own topic.

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That is just plain good netiquette… since the 90s, the reason being is if you bump and old thread you notify people about this for no reason.

Nobody literally nobody wants to drink lasts weeks coffee…

If there isn’t a relatively recent thread on the topic in question… you “make fresh coffee”.

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Honestly, I think that it’s a bit in nature of forums to derail. This has even increased during last decades for different reasons. Better bandwidths, people getting more easily online etc.

Most of time, it goes back on topics after 3 or 5 posts. I think that it is acceptable.
It really becomes annoying when it derails in chain. I.e It goes from original topic A to topic B and this topic B derails in another topic C. Then someone comes back to topic A but people keep answering randomly on each topic. That must be taken quickly otherwise, you can’t even split things without massive headaches.

Of course, for “serious” conversations, it would be better, if possible, to have a private section or to use other means like mailing lists, but, it’s not always possible for everyone. Having these discussions here shows that you have nothing to hide; it’s not that bad.

Serious topics are quite easy to spot with habit and it’s up to everyone to take care and avoid polluting discussions. It’s not that difficult, it just need common sense.
Also, people can drink what they want but, before posting, some beverages are more recommended than others. :smiley:

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“I doubt BiPolar themselves” why is there multiple BiPolar’s?

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This is neutral third person singular, not plural.

(this is the they/them pronoun used in a neutral singular way)

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Do you prefer Web 1.0 forums that treat everything as bbcode, make it hard to past code, and have broken handling of quotes?

I don’t think we can blame “Web 3.0”, or even “Web 2.0” for this. Web forum software has forever been pushing the limits of what should be done through a website, instead of more appropriate tools. But everyone decided to use them instead of mailing lists (which I can understand, I’m happy to use mailing lists for Haiku, but not for other projects where I occasionally contribute) or newsgroups (which also have their own problems).

It turns out, online collaboration is hard, and I don’t think there are much really good opensource tools to help us there?

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What is the problem with code? Just use ```.

status_t
XhciRing::Init(uint32 segmentCount)
{
	XhciRingSegment* lastSegment = NULL;

	for (; segmentCount > 0; segmentCount--) {
		ObjectDeleter<XhciRingSegment> newSegment(new(std::nothrow) XhciRingSegment());
		if (!newSegment.IsSet())
			return B_NO_MEMORY;
		CHECK_RET(newSegment->Init(false));

		if (lastSegment == NULL) {
			lastSegment = newSegment.Get();
			lastSegment->SetNext(lastSegment);
			fEnqueue = XhciRingRider(lastSegment);
			fDequeue = XhciRingRider(lastSegment);
		} else {
			newSegment->SetNext(fEnqueue.seg);
			lastSegment->SetNext(newSegment.Get());
			lastSegment = newSegment.Get();
		}
		newSegment.Detach();
	}

	// Set cycle toggle bit for last segment link TRB
	lastSegment->LinkTrb()->flags |= (1U << TRB_3_TC_BIT);

	return B_OK;
}
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Well that´s what the forum is for, I guess. I really wonder why the discussion about the kernel device manager wasn´t happening on the development mailing list.

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Extremely long lines, it breaks normal scrolling. Huge text makes this unreadable, and random text highlighting based on “heuristics” often breaks the code.

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Yes, and no. It wouldn’t be “too” hard to have an option of “stop replacing random text with images”, but that isn’t done, rather it tries to be smart and instead constantly gets in my way. You can’t even post normal emojies on this forum.
using the wird backticks to disable using normal chars for markup instead introduces it using another markup.

I’m not saying bbcode is better, but i am certainly saying the current way is worse, and that is also with the huge fonts and text boxes that break normal OS controls for e.g scrolling.

I am now in the “funky” situation that I do have these high resolution monitors, yet there fits much much less on it than it did with the web 1.0 way. On my laptop in fullscreen this software manages to display one or maybe two posts below each other that consist of just one sentence.

Edit: but yes, a “proper” native forum software would be better.

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That’s hilarious! I’m saving that one.

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Well, it’s english. It’s already a difficult language full of exceptions, this doesn’t really help it’s case ; )